His dream sank, so now what?

With each swimming pool Ken Barnes Jr. scrubbed, a worry inside him grew that he would someday die having never truly lived.

After cleaning more than 75,000 pools over two decades, Barnes, 46, used the money from the sale of his business and Newport Beach house to escape his midlife doldrums with the help of a 44-foot ketch. In October, he sailed out of Long Beach Harbor for what he planned to be a nonstop solo voyage around the world.

At sea, Barnes’ obsession about never experiencing life to its fullest was slowly torn away by the wind, the cold and the roar of the ocean as he climbed the mast of his boat, inch by inch, to cut the sail during a ferocious Pacific storm that pitched his boat 60 degrees from port to starboard and back again.

“I’m alive,” he thought.

Days later, a monstrous wave flipped his boat 360 degrees, ripped off his two masts and busted two hatches, allowing water to rush inside.

Now he faced a choice.

He stared at the bright-yellow cube in his trashed cabin, which was slowly filling with water. He had to decide whether to activate the distress beacon to summon rescuers to his aid 500 miles off Chile or go down with the boat that would always hold his dream.

“I can pull that pin and accept all this help from everybody when that is exactly what I don’t want, and I don’t [care] whether I make it through this or not,” Barnes remembers thinking. “But, damn it, I got a family. At this point, I can’t think of myself anymore.”

He pulled the pin and was rescued three days later by a Chilean fishing trawler. When he finally folded himself into one of the crew’s tightly packed bunks, he stared at the next bunk a foot away and wondered what, if anything, had been accomplished by wagering his entire fortune on the trip.

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Barnes decided a decade ago to plan a solo trip around the world, at first secretly. He was in his mid-30s, married and the father of three young children. By 2006, he thought, he would have the money, and his son and two daughters would be in their 20s. A late-October departure would allow him to reach Cape Horn -- the voyage’s gravest challenge -- during the warmest and calmest weather.

Over the years, the dream slowly came together. In 2001, he cashed in on the beginnings of the latest real estate boom and sold his house. Last year, he sold the one-man pool business that he had built over 20 years.

“I had to jump off the merry-go-round,” Barnes said.

“Every single day, you get up to go to work ... and the next thing you know, you’re 70 years old and you look back and you go, ‘How come I never got off that merry-go-round? How come I never lived life?’ ”

The sales left him with no bills and $250,000 to buy and outfit the vessel that would carry him around the world.

Twice a day, every day, he searched websites for the right boat. He traveled to Rhode Island, San Francisco and around the Southland. He considered building his dream boat himself before finally finding a 44-foot ketch in Georgia.

Named Hummingbird, the boat had been designed for long solo voyages, but the two previous owners had seen their dream to circle the world thwarted by family illness.

Barnes bought the vessel primarily for its steel hull, a feature that was difficult to find and one he believed was essential for the waters around Cape Horn, where harsh weather, icebergs and other perils could break weaker material.

He rechristened the boat Privateer to match his mission. “It was private. It was what I wanted to do. I’m doing it myself. I’m paying for it myself,” Barnes said.

He sailed away Oct. 28, as he had planned a decade before, under a radiant sky from the same Long Beach Harbor where he first learned to sail on a small dinghy as an 8-year-old. He planned to return to the harbor in about seven months. He had never sailed alone for more than a week.

When he hit the open sea, Barnes finally started to feel like he was living his dream. He read stacks of true crime and mystery books. He sat doing little for hours. Never had he felt more free.

It got even better as the boat slid farther south, and the computer showed increasingly foul weather. As he pressed forward, he learned to change to smaller sails or take them down altogether until the weather passed. He made errors by sometimes choosing the wrong combination of sails and slowing his progress, but he felt he was quickly learning to stay outside the worst of the storms.

His retreat was the cabin, built to be an impenetrable refuge. There, he celebrated Thanksgiving by eating a can of nuts.

As he reached the waters off South America, the weather cooled, sometimes dipping below freezing. The steel-hulled boat became an oversized ice box. Barnes reveled in the extremes that most people never experience in life.

“You don’t know hot until you know what cold is; you don’t know one extreme until you know the other,” Barnes said. “You realize, ‘I’m in here! I’m seeing things most people don’t see!’ ”

By Christmas, the storms became more frequent, and Barnes embraced them.

“The best time is at 2 a.m. when you are woken up by thunder so loud that it’s shaking the boat and you go out on deck and the lightning is like a lightbulb exploding 2 inches from your face, and here you are standing on a steel boat,” Barnes said. “Everything else is mundane.”

As the storm grew more fierce, he realized he had to steady the boat and came out of the cabin to lower a sail attached to a line that had tangled at the top of a deck light. To unhook it, he climbed the mast, inch by inch, with failing hands, tired and cold. It took 2 1/2 hours.

“I was on the edge of my abilities,” Barnes said.

A few days before New Year’s, the weather reports showed another low-pressure system in his path. He chose to sail ahead.

The storm proved to be far more erratic than others, with waves coming from all directions. There were 45-mph winds, freezing temperatures and 30-foot waves crashing onto the deck. The sea was “a washing machine,” he said.

Back in the cabin, he put in earplugs but the racket from the storm was still deafening. He wondered if the wind carried with it the voices of sailors who went to their watery graves trying to round Cape Horn.

“There are noises out there, all kinds of noises, including where you are sitting there at night, and you think you hear voices and you would associate those voices with the people who went before you and didn’t make it,” Barnes said.

When the boat rolled, it happened in an instant.

“There was only before and after,” Barnes said. The boat had no mast, electricity or any other means of moving forward. His trip was over. He pulled the pin to activate the beacon.

By the time of his rescue and arrival in Punta Arenas, Chile, five days later, the story of his adventure had been cruelly rewritten. It was no longer a testimony to self-reliance and private triumph. The tale -- followed by people around the world -- was now about a heroic three-day rescue mission involving the Chilean navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. State Department, ham radio operators, cargo ships, fishing trawlers and a fellow solo sailor.

Barnes came to appreciate their aid and offered them emotional thanks, but he can’t bring himself to look at the photos of his crippled boat that appeared in the news around the world.

“It’s kind of like your dog is old and you drove him up into the mountains and you took him out of the car and laid him on the side of the road and drove away,” Barnes said. “He was still alive when you left and there wasn’t too much that you could do about it.”

Now back home in Newport Beach, his life’s shortcomings have reemerged and loom even larger. He needs money and has to get back on the merry-go-round. Maybe he’ll get his captain’s license and shuttle tourists to Catalina Island.

“I had my chance, and I failed,” he said, shortly after taking out the trash back at the condo he shares with his girlfriend.

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garrett.therolf@latimes.com

Times staff writer Seema Mehta and researcher John Jackson contributed to this report.